A new Level 3 prototype, designed to solve Ethereum’s scalability issues, should be deployed for testing as early as the first quarter of 2023.
zkSync, a zero-knowledge blockchain solutions provider, announced on October 10 that it intends to roll out a new Level 3 EVM-capable prototype called “Pathfinder” on its testnet early next year.
zkSync is a L2 Ethereum scaling protocol designed to reduce the cost of network usage. It released version 1.0 back in June 2020 and is now preparing to launch zkSync 2.0 later this month.
In their latest blog, the team explained that the L3 Pathfinder will be “a prototype demonstrating ZK folding as a level 3 fractal chain”. It will use recursive scaling.
“It will serve as a basis for public trials and level III research and development,” the statement said.
They stated that while there would be a 10- to 100-fold increase in Level 2 performance, “Level 3 performance is unlimited”.
The zkSync team stated that their goal is to create “a L3 ecosystem of customizable, insecurely connected blockchains based on zkEVM, which we call ‘HyperChains'”.
The team claims that the L3 prototype will provide a number of opportunities to significantly improve different areas of blockchain performance, such as scalability, personalization, and security.
It will also be added to the zkSync-compatible L2 network with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) (version 2.0), which is scheduled to launch on October 28.
Steve Newcomb, product manager at Matter Labs, the engineering team responsible for zkSync, told Cointelegraph that the team is looking forward to seriously scaling their L3 solution:
“[Our] L2 solution would be 10x to 100x max on L2, but this is L3 where we have like a 10x star cluster where we do it faster, cheaper and more convenient.”
“That’s where the game is going to be [L3] and you know, the reason people see us differently from Polygon is actually because when they switch to that L2 resolution it’s a lot less productive than we are,” he added.
Newcomb noted that after the launch of ZkSync’s L2 mainnet later this month, there will be a testing period of about a month before the launch of decentralized applications (DApps). The team expects to have around 150 projects ready for launch.
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As for the L3 solution being added to L2, zkSync indicated that the team intends to “run a strong experiment” with it to determine perceived performance improvement capabilities.
The five main areas the project focuses on are performance, cost, usability and installation.
“Developers will be able to choose from 3 options for data availability using the same validation framework as their project. Developers can choose to trade-off between price, performance, and security.
